Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir Read Free

long-held habit. Maybe when the awkwardness passed, when he knew me, I would know what it was to have a father’s love. That gaping hole would be filled.

ii Italy
    W e were a pair of traveling adventurers, my mother and I. We spent my first birthday on Crete. We watched the New York Harbor from the Statue of Liberty’s crown when I was five. We walked through the ruins of Mount Vesuvius in Naples when I was eight. And now we were headed back to home base, the Pacific Northwest. Every daughter looks to her mother to see what a woman is supposed to be. I knew mine was unique. Independent. Traveled. Confident. Beautiful. I saw those qualities in me because I saw them in her.
    Right before my second birthday, we left Barcelona for an island off Seattle. We arrived in America just in time to celebrate the country’s bicentennial. My mom has a picture of me on a rocky beach, standing next to a piece of driftwood, waving a little American flag on a stick and wearing all red, white, and blue.
    A few of our years on the island, we lived with a man I called Daddy. When he decided he didn’t want a ready-made family, he left, confirming the title Daddy meant “one who abandons.” His breakup with my mother was also his breakup with me. It was then I started asking my mother about my “real father,” and shetold me his foreign name. Until our meeting at the café, the only thing I remember knowing about my father was his first name. It surprised me. I didn’t know anyone with that name. I was just learning to write, and I wrote it in crayon across the top of my pictures.
    After the man I’d called Daddy left, my mother decided a fresh start was in order. We started making plans to go to Europe. A year before that hot Barcelona afternoon, my mother and I arrived in Rome with two one-way tickets and five maroon and navy suitcases, a matching set she bought for our adventure. The suitcases ranged in size from extra-large to tiny and made me feel like we were going on a safari. My mother figured she’d find a job when we arrived in the country. That’s how she’d always done it.
    “Do you all have a place to stay tonight?” a talkative woman sitting across the airplane aisle from my mother asked. “I have a reservation at a pensione at the top of the Spanish Steps, if you want to share it.”
    “Okay,” my mother replied without appearing to give it much thought.
    I looked up from my Nancy Drew book in surprise. “We don’t even know her,” I whispered to my mom as the plane was descending.
    “That’s what you do when you’re traveling. Rome is expensive. This will cut our night’s stay in half.”
    When our cab pulled up to the pensione , I saw a white stone staircase the width of three buildings and the length of a block cascading down to a street below: the Spanish Steps. The three of us stepped into the reserved room, felt the stale air push against us, and found only one bed.
    The chatty stranger turned to me. “Let’s go up to the rooftop and sleep. It’ll be cooler up there.” Obviously an extrovert, she figured an eight-year-old was better than no company at all.
    “I’m not so sure,” my mother answered. Sharing a room with a stranger was one thing, having her take her eight-year-old daughteralone to the roof was another. Besides, my mother had warned me not to be the “ugly American,” an obnoxious person who showed up in a different country and demanded to know why no one did things like they do back home. “You want to blend in,” my mother said. I knew the look she was giving meant she doubted this woman was very good at blending in.
    “Please, Mommy! I’m not even tired.”
    My mother made a comment about jet lag, and I decided it was permission. So the stranger woman and I took blankets and pillows up to the rooftop patio and laid them on top of cushions from the patio furniture. We listened to the traffic of scooters buzzing and honking through the night as our bodies fought the